Archinect - Features

A Conversation with Trey Trahan, FAIA, Architecture’s Business-centric Polymath

2020-08-31T13:54:00-04:00

Archinect first connected with Trey Trahan back in 2008 for an enlightening interview about architecture, design, and the origins of his practice, Trahan Architects. Perhaps one of the most intriguing things about Trey are his inherent polymathic qualities. He is a true modern renaissance man. While the design leader has reached undoubted success in the architecture industry, he has also developed a deep and profound relationship with art, drawing inspiration from his personal collection in many areas of his business and architectural work.

Business is a craft for Trey, something to be mastered and thoughtfully practiced. There is a holistic approach to life, with service to people and the community as the focus, and architecture, business, leadership, and art as vehicles to facilitate that service. Here 12 years after our first meeting, we connect with the architect again, for a discussion about leadership, creative philosophy, art, the recent pandemic, and architecture’s more pro...

Extra Extra: Meow Wolf Transmogrification

2019-06-01T10:48:00-04:00

“It is art, just like sci-fi and fantasy is literature” — George R.R. Martin on Meow Wolf

Everyone knows that most interstellar spacecraft visiting Earth prefer landing in New Mexico. UFO’s consistently enjoy the remote landscapes, fresh cuisine, and picturesque scenery of the Southwestern United States. In a recent visit I decided to search for stranded vessels. What I found was an entirely different type of otherness in the desert. But I didn’t look in the vast empty darkness of Roswell or the secure and mysterious Area 51. My search began and ended with Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return at 1352 Rufina Circle in Santa Fe.

The Propping of Art and Architecture: a Review of the Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles

2019-02-26T18:54:00-05:00

The inaugural Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, held on the famed Paramount Studios Lot, proved to be a success in numbers and figures. But what did the event suggest about the current states of art and architecture, and what did it suggest about the future of cultural events in the city often overlooked for its sprawl?

The Venice Biennale Swamp Pavilion, Part II: Futurity Island

2018-09-04T13:27:00-04:00

Earlier this month, we featured the first week of events from the Venice Biennale's Swamp School: Swamp Radio, a series of acoustic space explorations, radio experiments, environmental sound recordings and data sonification.

Futurity Island, the Swamp School's second week of events, was held from June 25th to the 30th. It provided its participants with a space and a series of field trips to speculate on urban and material futures and imagine radically new forms of inderdisciplinarity. Given the recent news of Miami's precarious fate as well as that of other coastal cities and islands, the discussions that took place seemed especially apt.

Given the urgency of collective response, the organizers of the Swamp School, Gediminas Urbonas and Nomeda Urbonas, intended to inspire a single question among its participants: "how can we co-live with the swamp?"

The Venice Biennale Swamp Pavilion, Part I: Swamp Radio

2018-08-15T13:36:00-04:00

Though Venice has been the home of the eponymous Biennale since 1895 and the site of Western trade since roughly 400 AD, its longer history as a swamp is often overlooked. Its parcel of land and sea in Northeast Italy is notably hot, humid and rife with mosquitos, and has been since time immemorial. The ecosystems that depends on its swampy soil and vapor are threatened by human settlement, which has made it one of the most popular tourist destinations in modern history.

The Swamp Pavilion, Lithuania's contribution to the 2018 Venice Biennale, is a networked effort to highlight the intersection of human and natural history present in Venice in the middle of what is commonly referred to as the 'Anthropocene.' Organized by Gediminas Urbonas and Nomeda Urbonas, the Swamp School has developed new theories and pedagogies in the format of a 'school,' through public interventions, field trips, workshops, lectures, discussions, chat channels and printed publications.

Its first of three inst...

Soapbox: Ai Weiwei

2018-08-08T09:00:00-04:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

Soapbox: Dada

2018-07-18T09:00:00-04:00

Founded by Painter-turned-Architect Shane Neufeld, L/AND/A Blurs the Lines Between Art and Architecture

2018-04-23T09:00:00-04:00

L/AND/A (short for Light and Air Architecture), is an Brooklyn-based practice run by Shane Neufeld. An artist, writer, and an architect, Neufeld studied painting and literature before getting his Master's from the Yale School of Architecture. Founded in 2017, L/AND/A was Neufeld's opportunity to explore the intersections between the worlds of art and architecture. For this week's Small Studio Snapshot, we talk with him about the relationship between the two and his transition from one into the other.

Soapbox: Surrealism

2018-03-21T09:00:00-04:00

Cutting a Rug: Making the Abstract Tangible With Urban Fabric + Elena Manferdini's "Building Portraits" area rugs

2017-02-10T12:13:00-05:00

After the success of Four O Nine’s “Urban Fabric” rugs, the firm has partnered with designer Elena Manferdini to create “Building Portraits,” a series of limited-edition area rugs that incorporate riffs on Miesian patterns and city grids with more abstract impressions of urbanity. The result, as unveiled in an opening in L.A.’s Chinatown on January 27th, is a mesmerizing blend of texture and architectural imagination.

When you cut funding and abandon people, surprises happen

2017-01-17T11:42:00-05:00

Detroit, once one of the 20th century’s top three thriving U.S. metropolises, has been a case study in ruin and decay for nearly half a century. “Detroit is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age,” a new book of photographs and nuanced essays by Camilo Jose Vergara, delves into this culture of ruin, offering architects and urban planners an intriguing (and often surprising) pictorial atlas of what happens to a civilization during uncivilized times.

paraSITE: the bandage over the nomadic wound

2016-05-27T11:04:00-04:00

Using the air discharged from publicly accessible HVAC units, artist Michael Rakowitz has created a series of inflatable temporary plastic shelters for the homeless he calls “paraSITE.” The work, which began in 1998 and was later added to the MoMA’s Architecture and Design online collection, is both a form of social protest and an ingenious, budget-conscious design (most units cost around $5 to construct).

Art + Architecture: Swipes and Changeups with Mike Nesbit

2015-11-25T14:12:00-05:00

"I'm always looking at things and taking them at face value," said Mike Nesbit, a Los Angeles-based architect and artist, as he leaned over the table and grabbed an empty glass to use as illustration. He turned the glass over in his hands several times causing the reflection of an overhead light to splinter and reform with each rotation. “Surveying a found object,” he continued, “and trying to eliminate the predetermined meaning that I have in my hand.”

Art + Architecture: Andreas Angelidakis between the monumental and the particular

2015-05-12T14:10:00-04:00

Buoyantly imaginative yet grounded by a commitment to sociopolitical realism, the work of the Greek-born architect Andreas Angelidakis defies categorization. In fact, while he was trained as an architect at SCI-Arc, Angelidakis' work is perhaps better known in contemporary art circles than among architects. After all, Angelidakis exhibits in museums (and online) more than he builds. Yet his work, which takes the form of renderings, videos, sculptures, dioramas and installations, is visibly marked by an architectural sensibility. With near-manic intensity, Angelidakis’ work operates fluidly on the uneven terrain of the contemporary moment, invoking ecological disaster, digital and post-digital networks, economic crises, celebrity culture – often all at once. At the same time, specters of history – both imagined and real – never escape his expansive purview.

Ghosts of Schindler's past haunt Renee Green's MAK Center exhibition

2015-03-24T12:10:00-04:00

Where does an encounter with a work of architecture begin? There is the building as it first emerges on the horizon. Then the series of connected moments as you approach, that, like in a film, change according to variables of speed and distance, of the position of the subject in relation to the object. There is also the moment of crossing the threshold, the ambiguous line that demarcates inside from outside.

White Space: The Architecture of the Art Fair

2015-01-13T09:30:00-05:00

In his 1942 short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a universe consisting of a potentially infinite library of adjacent hexagonal rooms. Convinced that the library contains every imaginable ordering of twenty-five orthographic symbols, the inhabitants of this universe search incessantly, and futilely, for meaning amid the endless shelves. While an individual art fair is never actually infinite, its labyrinthine rows of cubicles can appear endless.

Art + Architecture: Refik Anadol at Walt Disney Concert Hall

2014-11-21T18:16:00-05:00

The billowing wood panels of the concert hall imploded before my eyes, as if physically ripped apart by the thundering crescendos of Edgard Varèse’s Amériques. One moment the massive organ was radically disfigured to the point of unrecognizability; the next, its forms re-emerged beneath the luminous, moving mesh mapped onto the structure by the artist Refik Anadol. For less than a half hour, the Walt Disney Concert Hall was transformed in an exhilarating synthesis of architecture, music and digital art: the first iteration of in/SIGHT, a series of ongoing collaborations between video artists and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Art + Architecture: Felix Melia and Josh Bitelli in the Gaps Between Buildings

2014-10-17T12:44:00-04:00

Felix Melia and Josh Bitelli are artists who live and work in London. We met last year and have remained in contact through email since then, exchanging periodic updates and continuing our fragmentary, rambling conversations over shared interests (and confusions) regarding the contemporary urban experience. Threads of continuity arise between individual emails with each of them, unsurprising since the two are old friends, share a new studio space, and often collaborate. Our conversations are inescapably informed by the digital media that allows them but at the same time bears traces of a perhaps nostalgic notion of letter exchanges. Both Melia and Bitelli investigate the city through the (often unnoticed) infrastructure and industrial processes that support it, while also grappling with the shifts in phenomenological experience produced by the internet – all of which is often tinged with an undeniable romanticism.

Art + Architecture: an interview with Lagos documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak

2014-07-16T18:29:00-04:00

Several weeks ago, we featured Bregtje van der Haak's interactive documentary, Lagos Close and Wide: an Interactive Journey into an Exploding City, originally released as a DVD in 2004 and now available online. The project emerged from van der Haak's 2001 trip to Lagos, Nigeria with the architect Rem Koolhaas and their attempt to capture the city at a crucial moment in its emergence as the fastest growing city on the continent. ("Every hour, fifty new people start their lives in Lagos" states the film's description). The documentary utilizes a novel and innovative format in which the information is organized by distance – close-up, through the perspective of bus driver Olawole Busayo, and the more distant perspective typical of many urban studies. Users choose between these visual perspectives as well as various audio by Koolhaas and Lagosians. We recently touched base with van der Haak to better understand her motivations behind the project and experiences of making it.

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Art + Architecture: Schumacher vs. Post-Net

2014-07-09T17:23:00-04:00

In some architecture circles, hating on Patrik Shumacher’s “parametricism” is like hating on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. It signals a basic shared understanding that, among many other things, artistic professions are not removed from politics, that their practitioners do have responsibilities outside of formal concerns, and that replicating structures of violence is, in general, not a good thing. These conversations are so frequent that they are starting to feel rehearsed: first the staid question, then the momentary pause, finally the sigh of relief. “Now we can move on to the important things.”